Cloud Sourcing Experiment

If you are a musician of any description and have at some stage recorded some music, please read on. If you are not a musician or have not recorded any music, then you’re welcome to read on too, but I don’t require your active participation at this time thank you. If you’re going to try and catch me out by claiming that you’re not a musician but that you have recorded some music, then you can read on too, I may require your active participation, and furthermore I question your definition of the term musician.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Background
This is an experimental project, but I reject the use of ‘experimental’ as a credible musical genre. It might be the case that the album ends up being filed under ‘bluegrass’ or ‘hip hop/R&B’ or ‘2-bit wet-tech physicswave’ in all good record shops, time will tell. But the process is an experiment in the truest sense. I intend to compile an album of non-genre-specific music, and to do this I need contributions from the public. Taking my cue from classic/conventional rock/pop production, I’ll use guitar, drums, bass, vocals, maybe even a splash of keyboard, and maybe the occasional background vocal. You, the general public, will provide the separate components. I will then be responsible for compiling and mixing.

Method
If you have access to separates from your recording session, then great, this is what I’ll be using. The album will be produced in a conventional way by arranging and mixing separate audio tracks from various instruments, only the difference between this project and a normal album production process is that none of the submitters will have heard any of the other submissions. You might send me a 4 minute hi-hat track from your nu-metal band, and I might decide to use that along with a kick drum taken from a country and western ballad, a snare from a free jazz combo and floor toms from a bunch of psych-rock revivalists. That’s none of your business. This might sound like a terrible idea to you, but that’s okay because you’re not doing it. I think it’s a great idea and will sound fantastic, which is why I am doing it.

I’m asking for uncompressed audio separates that fall into the following categories:

What I do want:
Good, clean, professional quality audio separates ideally with no bleed-through from other instruments that might have been recorded at the same time. I realise that this is pretty tricky where drums are concerned, in which case I’m after drums that have been recorded with separate mics on each piece of kit, rather than the whole kit being recorded simultaneously with a single mic. If this proves to be too difficult then I’ll settle for whole kit recordings.
Tracks taken from a single credible piece of music.
Anything between 3 and 6 minutes in length (give or take – I mean, 2:50 would be okay, but 25:00 wouldn’t be).
Original music that you own the copyright to.
Material in any genre or style, as long as it fits into one of the categories above.
Tracks from amateurs and professionals alike. Separates are welcome from all.

What I don’t want:
Your solo version of a popular hit recorded in your bedroom on your phone.
Complete stereo recordings of your whole band.
A 5 minute solo jam. As in, don’t just noodle away aimlessly on your Fender Jazzmaster and submit that – I want the audio to have been recorded for inclusion in an ensemble piece, not intended as a stand-alone.

How to do it:
Upload your uncompressed audio file (no mp3s, please) to a third-party file hosting site such as Rapidshare, YouSendIt or Mediafire etc and email the link to me at cloudsource@simonproffitt.com. Or else get in touch for my address and you can post me a CD.

Other info:
In the first instance this is just an experiment. By submitting a track or tracks, you are agreeing to let me use the piece unaltered as a component in a new work, and you will still retain ownership of and copyright to your specific bit. You also agree to let me make the results available as low-quality mp3s. You are not giving me permission to do anything else with it, unless I specifically ask first and you say it’s ok. If it turns out that the results are spectacular (and I strongly suspect that they will be) and a major label wants to release the album in a massive worldwide distribution in multiple deluxe formats (as I strongly suspect they will), then I’ll make sure permissions are sought and contracts are signed and profits are shared. But I’m not doing this to get rich, certainly not at the expense of talented musicians like yourself, I’m doing this because I’m a restless, creative explorer.